I am thrilled that multilingual is a core initiative for Drupal 8. However, so far I have only seen discussions about text content. I believe it is important that we also address the needs for files as well.
This post is going to be heavily skewed to how I as a site builder + content editors would like to be able to work with the multilingual needs for files.
As I see it there are three main differences when it comes to multilingual needs for files:
- Language independent files - Mainly files (photos/music) of objects that will be that same for every language they are used in.
- Language dependent files that wont/cant be translated - Such as video clips, audio recordings that wont/cant be translated
- Language dependent files that will be translated - Such as screenshots used in tutorials
For all these it be possible to set is the file is language neutral or the language it is in. It should also be possible to set if it will be possible to add translated files to it as well as which will be the file used if a language specific doesn't exists. By default it will use the sites default language, but it should also be possible to override here.
That only covers the files themselves. Next is all the extras, such as text and metadata to the file. That can be Description, Alt, Title, Tags, etc... All this needs to be made available for translation as well.
A lot of this can be accomplished by Drupal already, but the main issue is that each file is managed independently and there are, as far as I know, no relations between them.
Especially looking at the way Drupal 8 will be device independent it should be a goal that translation of files, and their text data, is managed dynamically as well.
Thus, when I create a translation of a page, it should be possible to list all files used on that page. See their text data in the default language (and change it if it is available in several languages) so that I quickly can translate all those strings in one place.
If the file itself needs to be recreated in the language I am working on, I should be able to upload the new file and Drupal will then handle the relation between them.
When displaying files, Drupal knows the language the page is viewed in and will then be able to display the right version for me.
This should even be able to work with embedded files in content for modules such as the Media module that don't embed hard links to the files.
For documents there should also be a possibility to have smart download options. That is, if Drupal detects that a file is available in more than one language, then it can show a drop down menu listing those languages so the visitor quickly can switch to the language version they would like to download.
For users with the right permissions, it also needs to be easy to edit files and work with the languages they have permissions for for each file.
One other cool thing would be to be able to attach a file to a file. That can be used to for example attach a transcript and/or translation to an audio or video file.
Oki, that's what I can think of right now would be needed for working with multilingual needs for files. I hope this can be of some help in this core initiative.